Australia the pioneers of mystery spin craze that's taken cricket world by storm

AUSTRALIA is being left behind in a new global spin bowling craze - and the bush legend who showcased the art 50 years ago can't understand why.

The enchanting craft of mystery spin, where bowlers propel the ball both ways off a bent middle finger, is changing the face of cricket with Sunil Narine (West Indies), Saeed Ajmal (Pakistan) and Ajantha Mendis (Sri Lanka) creating confusion around the cricket world.

Australia has unofficially deemed it too difficult to coach but here's the irony: we were pioneers of the art, inventing and refining it.

Australia's Jack Iverson refined it during countless hours of experimentation during his service in an anti-aircraft regiment in New Guinea in World War II.

Then John Gleeson, a little known Tamworth wicket-keeper until his early 20s, studied Iverson's grip in a magazine and used it to harvest 93 wickets in 29 Tests from 1967-72 in an era when brutal lbw laws allowed batsmen to safely kick the ball away when they could not read it.

Gleeson, who played club cricket in Sydney after being encouraged to do so by Richie Benaud, is watching the world change and has urged Australia never to think the craft is too difficult to learn or that you need special physical gifts to become finger flickin' good.

"I don't think it was a physical thing,'' Gleeson said from Tamworth. "It is certainly an advantage to have a bigger hand, which I had but it was not outlandish. You see some of them have got big stubby fingers. Mine are pretty thin.

"Most of the people I have tried to help have trouble getting it over 22 yards. Peter Philpott could do it but not over 22 yards. To me it was quite natural. I wicketkept for years but I practised this. I was no different from any other country cricketer.

"I saw a July copy of a Sporting Life magazine in 1951 and there was a photo of Jack Iverson's grip. We used to play in our front yard in front of the jacaranda trees with a tennis ball and I used to play against the kids. I could bowl them around their legs with that silly bloody grip. That is how it started. It was good fun. Most enjoyable.''

Gleeson believes the advantages of finger-flicking spin is that it enables bowlers to spin the ball both ways, which most traditional off-spinners cannot do.

''I try to encourage off spinners to do it. Off-spinners in this country have a bloody hard road to hoe.

"The reverse wrong'un is a great ball to have. You can run up and bowl what looks like an off-spinner and it goes the other way. The thing about it is you only have to do it once every blue moon. It makes the other balls more effective because you get the batsman in a state of uncertainty."

The common thread between Mendis, Ajmal and Narine is that they come from regions where coaching is far less reliant on the text book than Australia, a point not missed by Australian Twenty20 captain George Bailey.

"As a nation we still talk about whether guys have legitimate actions or not and at the end of the day that's really not for us to be arguing about," Bailey said.

"If that's the rules and that's how bowlers are bowling now and having success in international cricket then we've got to start developing those players and developing them at 10-11 years of age and we'll start to have some bowlers who do bowl like Murali or Ajmal or Narine.''